There’s absolutely nothing to gain by gun registration. At least, not for gun owners. While gun grabbers may love and adore it, convinced that they have found the solution to crime–if they’re particularly deluded, that is–gun owners tend to understand that registering their guns doesn’t really do anything to make them safer.

Last month, April, 2018, the California Department of Justice raided prominent Kern County Farmer, Jeffrey Scott Kirschenmann. The justification for the raid was pictures the farmer had sent to the Department of Justice in an attempt to register a rifle. The DOJ claimed the rifle was an illegally modified “Assault weapon”. During the raid, the DOJ confiscated 230 rounds of ammunition, a dozen guns, two objects claimed to be “silencers”, and some sort of trigger activator.

There is reason to be wary of the accuracy of the claims of what was found during the raid. California law is very complex. California law enforcement officers have been known to make mistakes about what is an “assault weapon” and what is not. “Silencers” can only be determined with a test to see if the devices actually reduce the sound signature of a firearm. There are many fake look alike simulated “silencers” on the market. From kget.com:

Retired KCSO Commander Joe Pilkington is a court recognized firearms expert. He could not speak directly to Kirschenmann’s case but says the laws are changing so frequently, it’s often hard to keep up with the latest regulations.

“Just in the last few years, there have been lots of changes in gun laws,” he said. “Making an effort, a good faith effort to comply with these really complicated laws, should count for something.”

A new state law requires assault-style weapons be registered by the end of June.

Pilkington recommends anyone who isn’t sure about the process go through a federally licensed firearms dealer.

For years, those who wish a disarmed population have told Second Amendment supporters that registration does not lead to confiscation. Second Amendment supporters have been repeatedly told “no one wants to confiscate your guns

Yep. We’ve been told that. Luckily, it seems most of us know that to be the bovine excrement that it is.

Of course it will lead to confiscation. Maybe not today or next year, but eventually, someone will knock on the door and want our guns. Of course, by “knock,” I could actually mean “kick it in.”

Still…

And Joe Pilkington is right. You can pick up fake suppressors for a very low price, all things considered. They’re purely for aesthetics, of course, but some can be made to make a rifle look like it’s actually a short-barrel rifle while still complying with the law. I know, I considered getting one at one time.

More importantly, though, is that California gun laws are clearly jacked up. How else would someone try to comply with the law and end up arrested? If the law was clear and he knew he had an illegal weapon–if he even did, mind you–he would have opted not to register it. Especially since he could have transported it to another state and sold it there legally. There was no reason for him to risk it.

Which is ample evidence in my mind that he didn’t know he was breaking any law, in my mind. Again, if he knew, why did he try to register it.

There’s a saying that ignorance of the law is no defense, which I get. I really do.

Yet at some point, there has to be a line. If men and women can be arrested when they’re clearly trying to notbreak the law, then what hope does any law-abiding citizen have? There’s a theory that the average person goes through life committing something like three felonies per day. I don’t know how accurate that is, but I have little difficulty believing that we break laws all the time without realizing it.

In a case like this, a man’s life basically hangs in the balance because of what, at its worst, is a misunderstanding.

A 19-year-old woman who was the victim of a violent gang rape in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail after being found guilty of being “indecent” at the time of the attack because she was not accompanied by a male guardian.

According to CNN, The government defended the outrageous court decision, saying that the victim was at fault, and noting that Saudi courts abide by Sharia law which dictates that a woman cannot be in public without a male guardian.

The original incident reportedly took place in 2006. At that time the victim was in a car with a friend when two men commandeered their vehicle and drove them to a secluded area. She was then violently raped by seven men, three of whom also attacked her friend.

Initially, the woman was sentenced to 90 lashes, while the men who raped her were given minor custodial sentences.

The obviously unfair verdict was appealed by the woman’s lawyer. However, instead of overturning the punishment, the court reportedly more than doubled the punishment for the woman, sentencing her to 200 lashes and six months in jail after being found guilty of indecency and talking to the media.

Middle East Monitor reports Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, who defended the woman, reached out to the media after the sentences were handed down. The court has since banned him from further defending the woman, as well as confiscating his license and summoning him to a disciplinary hearing.

The Ministry of Justice welcomes constructive criticism, away from emotions.
In Saudi Arabia, women are second class citizens, treated more like children than adults. Women are required to dress in black from head to toe, and require permission from a male guardian to work, to marry, to simply leave the home.

Adding insult to injury, Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world which does not allow women to drive.

In Saudi Arabia there is no political freedom, no religious freedom, no freedom of speech. It is, in fact, one of the most repressive regimes in recent history, and an affront to human rights and human dignity.

In fact, Saudi Arabia is one of the very few countries in the world not to accept the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Despite apparent wide-ranging reforms in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom is certainly sticking to its death-penalty tradition, decapitating 48 criminals this year alone.

(RT) Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman has been lauded by Western media as the ‘great reformer,’ he’s even been given the catchy, friendly acronym –- MbS. Bin Salman has been praised for finally allowing women to drive, enter sports stadia and opening the country’s first cinemas in a generation.

Bin Salman has been busy too, he has recently been on a worldwide charm offensive, with millions of dollars being spent on an army of PR firms, selling the image of Saudi Arabia as a modern country looking to reform, and diversify the country’s oil-dependent economy.

Yet some things don’t change. He continues to purchase a massive amount of weaponry from Britain and America while at home ‘the great reformer’ maintains the kingdom’s age-old practice of beheading people as punishment for serious crime.

Many of the 48 people who have been executed so far this year,accordingto Human Rights watch (HRW), have died for their involvement in non-violent crime while many more convicted of drug-related crime“remain on death row following convictions by Saudi Arabia’s notoriously unfair criminal justice system.”

In an interview with Time magazine on April 5, MbS said that the kingdom has a plan to decrease the overall number of executions but that this strategy did not pertain to those convicted of murder.

“Any plan to limit drug executions needs to include improvements to a justice system that doesn’t provide for fair trials,”HRW’s Sarah Leah Whitson said in a Thursday press release.

According to HRW Saudi Arabia has carried out almost 600 executions, in which the condemned are beheaded using a sword, since 2014. Over 200 of these were for drug offenses. The rest were for crimes such as murder, terrorism, rape, incest and sorcery.

California officials are hoping their latest attempt to stem the rising tides of climate change leads to a more socially conscious — and cooler — summer.

(FOX LOS ANGELES) Officials in Los Angeles have been painting streets white to reduce the effect of urban “heat islands” and combat the effects of climate change.

The LA Street Services beganrolling out the project last May, which preliminary testing shows has reduced the temperature of roadways by up to 10 degrees. The project involves applying a light gray coating of the product CoolSeal, made by the company GuardTop.

“CoolSeal is applied like conventional sealcoats to asphalt surfaces to protect and maintain the quality and longevity of the surface,”according to the company website. “While most cool pavements on the market are polymer based, CoolSeal is a water-based, asphalt emulsion.”

While each coasting could can last up to seven years, they are also pricey, with the estimated cost of $40,000 per mile, theL.A. Daily News reported.

Each coating of CoolSeal is estimated to cost $40,000 a mile, city officials told the LA Daily News. (LA Street Services)

CoolSeal does pass the California skid test in addition to the slip test for wet traction, and is applied in two coats, each 50 microns thick, over an asphalt roadway or a slurry-sealed asphalt roadway, according to the streets department.

By reducing the temperature of the city streets, officials say it can help reduce temperatures in the neighborhoods where the sealant is applied.

With its numerous streets and freeways, Los Angeles suffers from the “heat island” effect, which causes urban regions to become warmer than their rural surroundings, forming an “island” of higher temperatures.

The sealant has reduced roadway temperatures by up to 10 degrees in testing. (LA Street Services)

“Heat islands occur on the surface and in the atmosphere,”according to the Environmental Protection Agency. “On a hot, sunny summer day, the sun can heat dry, exposed urban surfaces, such as roofs and pavement, to temperatures 50–90°F hotter than the air1, while shaded or moist surfaces—often in more rural surroundings—remain close to air temperatures.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who may make a run for president in 2020, has used the project as part of an overall plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the city by 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2025.

“Climate change is a fact of life that people in Los Angeles and cities around the world live with every day. It is a grave threat to our health, our environment, and our economy — and it is not debatable or negotiable,” hesaid in a statement last yearafter President Trump said he would walk away from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Fight with words social issue concept as a person screaming with bullets flying out of the mouth as a metaphor for strong communication and aggressive shouting with 3D illustration elements.

Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is sometimes violence. We’re not talking about verbal threats of violence, which are used to coerce and intimidate, and which are illegal and not protected by the First Amendment. We’re talking about speech that is deemed by members of an identity group to be critical of the group, or speech that is otherwise upsetting to members of the group. This is the kind of speech that many students today refer to as a form of violence. If Milo Yiannopoulos speaks on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, is that an act of violence?

Recently, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, a highly respected emotion researcher at Northeastern University, published an essay inThe New York Timestitled, “When is speech violence?” She offered support from neuroscience and health-psychology research for students who want to use the word “violence” in this expansive way. The essay made two points that we think are valid and important, but it drew two inferences from those points that we think are invalid.

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First invalid inference: Feldman Barrett used these empirical findings to advance a syllogism: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.” It is logically true that if A can cause B and B can cause C, then A can cause C. But following this logic, the resulting inference should be merely that words can cause physical harm, not that words are violence. If you’re not convinced, just re-run the syllogism starting with “gossiping about a rival,” for example, or “giving one’s students a lot of homework.” Both practices can cause prolonged stress to others, but that doesn’t turn them into forms of violence.

Feldman Barrett’s second valid point lies in her argument that young people areantifragile—they grow from facing and overcoming adversity:

Offensiveness is not bad for your body and brain. Your nervous system evolved to withstand periodic bouts of stress, such as fleeing from a tiger, taking a punch or encountering an odious idea in a university lecture. Entertaining someone else’s distasteful perspective can be educational. … When you’re forced to engage a position you strongly disagree with, you learn something about the other perspective as well as your own. The process feels unpleasant, but it’s a good kind of stress — temporary and not harmful to your body — and you reap the longer-term benefits of learning.

Feldman Barrett could have gone a step further: This “good kind of stress” isn’t just “not harmful,” it also sometimesmakes an individual strongerandmore resilient. The next time that person faces a similar situation, she’ll experience a milder stress response because it is no longer novel, and because her coping repertoire has grown. This was the argument at the heart of our 2015 essay inThe Atlantic,“The Coddling of the American Mind.” We worried that colleges were making students more fragile—more easily harmed—by trying to protect them from the sorts of small and brief offensive experiences that Feldman Barrett is talking about.

What’s bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are long stretches of simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain. That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful words at one another, and oframpant bullyingin school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.

We agree. But what, then, are the implications for college campuses?

In Feldman Barrett’s second invalid inference, she writes:

That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.

But wait, wasn’t Feldman Barrett’s key point the contrast between short- and long-term stressors? What would have happened had Yiannopoulos been allowed to speak at Berkeley? He would have faced a gigantic crowd of peaceful protesters, inside and outside the venue. The event would have been over in two hours. Any students who thought his words would cause them trauma could have avoided the talk and left the protesting to others. Anyone who joined the protests would have left with a strong sense of campus solidarity. And most importantly, all Berkeley students would have learned an essential lesson for life in 2017: How to encounter a troll without losing one’s cool. (The goal of a troll, after all, isto make people lose their cool.)

The goal of the war on drugs is to reduce drug use. The specific aim is to destroy and inhibit the international drug trade — making drugs scarcer and costlier, and therefore making drug habits in the US unaffordable. And although some of the data shows drugs getting cheaper, drug policy experts generally believe that the drug war is nonetheless preventing some drug abuse by making the substances less accessible.

(VOX)The prices of most drugs, as tracked by theOffice of National Drug Control Policy, have plummeted. Between 1981 and 2007, the median bulk price of heroin is down by roughly 93 percent, and the median bulk price of powder cocaine is down by about 87 percent. Between 1986 and 2007, the median bulk price of crack cocaine fell by around 54 percent. The prices of meth and marijuana, meanwhile, have remained largely stable since the 1980s.

Much of this is explained by what’s known asthe balloon effect: Cracking down on drugs in one area doesn’t necessarily reduce the overall supply of drugs. Instead, drug production and trafficking shift elsewhere, because the drug trade issolucrative that someone will always want to take it up — particularly in countries where the drug trade might be one of the only economic opportunities and governments won’t be strong enough to suppress the drug trade.

Sometimes the drug war has failed to push down production altogether, like in Afghanistan. The US spent $7.6 billionbetween 2002 and 2014 to crack down on opium in Afghanistan, where a bulk of the world’s supply for heroin comes from. Despite the efforts, Afghanistan’s opium poppy crop cultivation reached record levels in 2013.On the demand side, illicit drug use has dramatically fluctuated since the drug war began. The Monitoring the Futuresurvey, which tracks illicit drug use among high school students, offers a useful proxy: In 1975, four years after President Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs, 30.7 percent of high school seniors reportedly used drugs in the previous month. In 1992, the rate was 14.4 percent. In 2013, it was back up to 25.5 percent.

Still, prohibition does likely make drugs less accessible than they would be if they were legal. A 2014 studyby Jon Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that prohibition multiplies the price of hard drugs like cocaine by as much as 10 times. And illicit drugs obviously aren’t available through easy means — one can’t just walk into a CVS and buy heroin. So the drug war is likely stopping some drug use: Caulkins estimates that legalization could lead hard drug abuse to triple, although he told me it could go much higher.

But there’s also evidence that the drug war is too punitive: A 2014 studyfrom Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago found there’s no good evidence that tougher punishments or harsher supply-elimination efforts do a better job of pushing down access to drugs and substance abuse than lighter penalties. So increasing the severity of the punishment doesn’t do much, if anything, to slow the flow of drugs.Instead, most of the reduction in accessibility from the drug war appears to be a result of the simple fact that drugs are illegal, which by itself makes drugs more expensive and less accessible by eliminating avenues toward mass production and distribution.

The question is whether the possible reduction of potential drug use is worth the drawbacks that come in other areas, including a strained criminal justice system and the global proliferationof violence fueled by illegal drug markets. If the drug war has failed to significantly reduce drug use, production, and trafficking, then perhaps it’s not worth these costs, and a new approach is preferable.

The mass shooting atMarjory Stoneman Douglas High Schoolin Parkland, Florida has once again ignited the public debate around assault weapons and large capacity magazines. And while no sweepinggun control lawshave been enacted at the federal level, one town in Illinois is taking matters into its own hands by discarding the second amendment.

(CBS News) The Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Illinois voted on Monday to ban the possession, sale, and manufacture of assault weapons and large capacity magazines to “increase the public’s sense of safety.” What’s more,CBS Chicago reports, anyone refusing to give up their banned firearm will be fined $1,000 a day until the weapon is handed over or removed from the town’s limits.

Theordinancestates, “The possession, manufacture and sale of assault weapons in the Village of Deerfield is not reasonably necessary to protect an individual’s right of self-defense or the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.”

So, beginning June 13, banned assault weapons in Deerfield will include semiautomatic rifles with a fixed magazine and a capacity to hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, shotguns with revolving cylinders, and conversion kits from which assault weapons can be assembled. And those are just a few of the firearm varieties banned. The list is long and includes all the following models or duplicates thereof: AK, AKM, AKS, AK-47, AK-74, ARM, MAK90, Misr, NHM 90, NHM 91, SA 85, SA 93, VEPR, AR-10, AR-15, Bushmaster XM15, Armalite M15, Olympic Arms PCR, AR70, Calico Liberty, Dragunov SVD Sniper Rifle, Dragunov SVU, Fabrique NationalFN/FAL, FN/LAR, FNC, Hi-Point Carbine, HK-91, Kel-Tec Sub Rifle, SAR-8, Sturm, Ruger Mini-14, and more.Antique handguns that have been rendered permanently inoperable and weapons designed for Olympic target shooting events are exempt, as are retired police officers.

“We hope that our local decision helps spur state and national leaders to take steps to make our communities safer,” Deerfield Mayor Harriet Rosenthal said in a press release, after the ban on assault weapons passed unanimously.

The nearby suburb of Highland Park passed a similar ban in 2013, which was contested as unconstitutional by one of the city’s residents and the Illinois State Rifle Association. Ultimately, however, the ordinance was upheld in court.

Last year on the campaign trail, crowds roared when Donald Trump denounced his opponent as “trigger-happy” Hillary. But President Trump is rapidly incarnating the vice he condemned. Nowhere is this more evident than in Syria, where Trump’s recklessness risks dragging America into a major war.

Four years ago,Trump warned in a tweet: “If the U.S. attacks Syria and hits the wrong targets, killing civilians, there will be worldwide hell to pay.” But the Trump administration has sharplyincreased U.S. bombing while curtailing restrictions that sought to protect innocents. A British-based human rights monitoring group estimated Friday that U.S.-led coalition strikes hadkilled almost 500 civiliansin the past month — more than any month since U.S. bombing began. AUnited Nations commission of inquiryconcluded that coalition airstrikes have caused a “staggering loss of civilian life.”

U.S.-led forces are reportedly bombarding the besieged city of Raqqa with white phosphorous, a munition that burns intensely and is prohibited by international law from use against civilians. Deploying white phosphorous to attack Raqqa could be a war crime,Amnesty Internationalwarns.

Trump’s most dangerous innovation involves direct attacks on Syrian government forces, including last week’s shootdown of a Syrian jet fighter. The Russian government, which is backing Syrian President Bashar Assad, responded by threatening toshoot down any aircraftover much of Syria.

After the Syrian government was accused ofkilling at least 70 civilianswith sarin gas in April, Trump speedily ordered the launch of59 cruise missilesagainst a Syrian military airfield. Much of theAmerican news mediahailed the Syrian missile attack as Trump’s finest hour. When he gave the commencementaddress at Liberty University in May, the audience cheered when Trump was introduced as the man who “bombed those in the Middle East who were persecuting and killing Christians.” But America could pay a harsh price for Trump’s “virtue signalling” with bombs and missiles.

The biggest delusion driving U.S. policy is the quest for viable “moderate rebels” — which apparently means groups who oppose Assad but refrain from making grisly videos of beheadings. America has spent billions aiding and training Syrian forces who either quickly collapsed on the battlefield orteamed up with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or al-Qaeda-linked forces. Policy is so muddled thatPentagon-backed Syrian rebelshave openly battled CIA-backed rebels.

The United States has armed and aidedal-Qaeda-linked groupsin Syria despite federal law prohibiting providing material support to terrorist groups. A prominent Assad opponent who organized a conference of anti-Assad groups financed by the CIA was recentlydenied political asylum. The Department of Homeland Security notified Radwan Ziadeh that because he provided “material support” to the Free Syrian Army, he has “engaged in terrorist activity.”

By the same standard, thousands of CIA, State Department, Pentagon and White House officials should be jailed. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, has introducedThe Stop Arming Terrorists Act to prohibit any funding, support or weapons for al-Qaeda, ISIS and allied terrorist groups.

Republicans created a health care monster by lying to their base. They need to come clean.

Every side in the Syrian conflict has committed atrocities, often with approval of their foreign patrons. Former CIA officer Phil Giraldiobserved, “The Saudis, Qataris, Turks and Israelis are all currently (or have been recently) in bed with terrorist groups (in Syria) that the United States is pledged to destroy.”The Wall Street Journalreported this month that “Israel has been regularlysupplying Syrian rebelsnear its border with cash as well as food, fuel and medical supplies for years.”

The Syrian government has never threatened the United States, and Congress has not approved attacking it. White House spokesman Sean Spicerjustified Trump’s cruise missile attack because “when it’s in the national interest of the country, the president has the full authority to act.” But this is a recipe for unlimited power — warring limited solely by self-serving presidential proclamations.

Killing vast numbers of innocent civilians sows the seeds of future terrorist attacks on America. There are no good options for continuing U.S. intervention in Syria. The only question is whether Trump’s blundering will turn that war into a catastrophe for Americans as well as Syrians. AsTrump tweeted about Obama’s Syria policy in 2013: “Be prepared, there is a small chance that our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.”